Real Life Rock: The Complete Top Ten Columns, 1986-2014

599 Pages·2015·5.565 MB·English

by  Greil Marcus

Real Life Rock
Also by Greil Marcus
Mystery Train: Images of Ame rica in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (1975, 2015)
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989, 2009)
Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991)
In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1992 (1993, originally published
as Ranters & Crowd Pleasers)
The Dustbin of History (1995)
The Old, Weird Ame rica: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (2000, 2011,
originally published as Invisible Republic, 1997)
Double Trou ble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2000)
“The Manchurian Candidate” (2002)
Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005)
The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (2006)
When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (2010)
Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings, 1968–2010 (2010)
The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years (2011)
The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs (2014)
Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations (2015)
As editor
Stranded (1979, 2007)
Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs (1987)
The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad
(2004, with Sean Wilentz)
Best Music Writing 2009 (2009)
A New Literary History of Ame rica (2009, with Werner Sollors)
Real Life Rock
■
The Complete
Top Ten Columns,
1986–2014
■
GREIL MARCUS
New Haven and London
Published with assistance from the foundation established
in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College.
Copyright © 2015 by Greil Marcus.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,
in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational,
business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected]
(U.S. offi ce) or [email protected] (U.K. offi ce).
Designed by Sonia L. Shannon.
Set in Electra and Sans type by Westchester Publishing Services.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015935013
ISBN 978-0-300-19664-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sleater- Kinney
and
the Mekons
two threads in this column
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Contents
Introduction ix
The Village Voice, 1986–1990 1
Artforum, 1990–1998 69
Salon, 1999–2003 165
City Pages, 2003–2004 341
Interview, 2006–2007 377
The Believer, 2008–2014 393
Acknowledgments 523
Credits 525
Index of Names and Titles 527
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Introduction
A book this long cannot suffer a long introduction. The work collected
here began with a phone call at the beginning of 1986 from Doug Simmons, then
the music editor of the Village Voice. In 1978, for New West, a magazine the late Clay
Felker had launched as an outpost of his successful New York, I’d started a column
called Real Life Rock. I took the title from Magazine’s just- released album, Real
Life. I loved the title, not the album. Calling a few songs slotted onto an LP real life
seemed both ridiculous and like a challenge, or at least something to try to live up
to: the notion that you could fi nd real life anywhere, even on something shoved onto
an LP or hidden away on it. It was an essay column, but each essay, through 1983,
when it ended, closed with a top ten—s ongs, albums, commercials, ads, maybe a
comment on a dress Bette Midler wore at an awards show. Anything.
Doug wanted to know if I’d turn that list idea into an a ctual column. He gave me
the bottom third of a page once a month, about 700 words, which was room for
anything: m usic, movies, fi ction, critical theory, ads, telev is ion shows, remarks over-
heard waiting in line, news items, contributions from correspondents some of
whom, u nder their column names or their real names, are still sending in items
t oday, treating the column as a forum, or a good site for gossip, or the everyday con-
versation it has always wanted to be. I wrote the column every week until, in 1990,
the Voice hired a new m usic editor who didn’t like it. I moved it to Artforum, where
I worked with Ingrid Sischy, David Frankel, Ida Panicelli, Jack Bankowsky, and Syd-
ney Pokorny, off and on, with breaks to fi nish books, for nearly nine years, with
more space, a page or sometimes two, for the magazine’s ten issues a year. As in ev-
ery following incarnation, the column changed according to the frame of reference
of the publication and what I could presume the readership’s frame of reference
might be. The column began to take in more formal art, more politics, more novels,
more critical absurdities. When fi nally I had to take a break and c ouldn’t predict
ix